The role of grammar teaching in foreign language education is a controversial one both in second language acquisition (SLA) research and language pedagogy and, as a result, a potential source of confusion to student teachers. The objective of this study was to gain insight into the beliefs on grammar teaching of student teachers of English as a foreign language enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programmes at Dutch universities of applied sciences. To this end a questionnaire was developed and validated based on four construct pairs from SLA literature: meaning- versus form-focused instruction, focus on form (FonF) versus focus on forms (FonFs), implicit versus explicit instruction, and inductive versus deductive instruction. Overall, respondents ( n = 832) were found to prefer form-focused, explicit, inductive instruction, and FonFs. However, higher-year undergraduates’ and postgraduates’ results showed a trend towards a preference for more meaning-focused and implicit instruction, and FonF. When learner level was factored in, however, these forms of language instruction were considered subordinate to more traditional form-focused approaches for teaching higher-level language learners.
This study explored the role teacher education plays in influencing student teachers’ pedagogical grammar cognitions—defined as what student teachers know, think, and believe regarding grammar instruction—on the premise that investigating the impact of teacher education (or lack thereof) is more fruitful when considering it the result of complex interactions between various teacher education influences (and prior cognitions) rather than the outcome of individual courses. An instrumental case study was conducted to examine how a TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) bachelor degree program in the Netherlands attempted to impact student teacher cognitions on grammar instruction. For this purpose, various groups of stakeholders (16 student teachers, 10 teacher educators, and 6 school placement mentors) were interviewed, 30 hours of teaching were observed, and multiple data sources were triangulated. The outcomes demonstrate how several manifestations of incongruence, in secondary education as well as in teaching practice, fostered instead of challenged student teachers’ traditional pedagogical grammar cognitions, which were further consolidated and reinforced—albeit unintentionally—in teacher education as a result of inconsistencies in the curriculum, incongruent teaching models, and confusion arising from the dichotomy between disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
It is widely accepted that teacher cognitions—what teachers know, think, and believe—play a significant part in teachers’ decision‐making processes. The present study investigated the specific cognitions that 74 Dutch undergraduate and postgraduate student teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) had on grammar instruction and how these interfaced with learner‐oriented cognitions. Ten focus group interviews were held in which the necessity of grammar instruction, its role in the foreign language (FL) curriculum, and different approaches to grammar teaching were examined in relation to student teachers’ perceptions of their learners. The results show that the participants considered explicit, systematic, and isolated grammar instruction a necessary condition not only for linguistic correctness but also for advanced communicative competence. Moreover, complex interactional patterns were identified between cognitions on meaning‐ and form‐focused approaches on the one hand and learner characteristics on the other. Conceptions of the position and role of grammar in the FL classroom were found to be mediated by student teacher perceptions of learner autonomy, motivation, intellectual capabilities, needs, and instructional preferences. Awareness of these patterns may assist foreign language teacher educators in uncovering how their students operationalize grammar teaching, thereby creating opportunities to engage in deep, reflective processing of topics raised in grammar teaching courses and their link to teaching practice.
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